Borough Market trade up

Borough Market trade up

1/2

2/2

Back in time: Borough Market's new look is far removed from its workaday history of trading just fruit and veg in 1884 and 1928

(Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

What kind of place you think Borough Market is will depend on what kind of Londoner you are. For most, I guess, it’s a luxury food retail outlet that’s dominated by tourists, but still qualifies as a good place to hang out if you have out-of-town visitors. For high-brow foodies, it’s a place to buy quality groceries that are eye-wateringly expensive but worth every bio-dynamic penny. For others still, Borough Market is the epitome of gentrification, a rarefied urban experience with little or nothing to do with the life of most Southwark people. The place is event retail, a coming-together of luxury, the history of the capital and a still-spontaneous street life that is rare in central London today.

Whichever camp you fall into, the market seems to most of us an important survival, a public place filled with commerce, yes, but not identikit consumerism. This precious quality is amplified by the haphazard spaces the market occupies, partly under the knotted railway viaducts, and partly under a variety of intersecting roofs. It is not really architecture, just an atmosphere, lean-tos, arches and hole-in-the-wall cafés aggregated to make a place conducive to buying and selling. You could not have planned it like this, and indeed, no one did. This informal situation has persisted through many reconfigurations of the road and rail connections around it and it remains a rich experience.

Now a new layer of architecture has been completed within this haphazard context. Euston-based architect Jestico + Whiles has been working since 1998 designing a new viaduct coming out of London Bridge station to accommodate the expansion of the station and the enhanced Thameslink commuter line. That viaduct drives right through the site of the market, and has required careful planning, controversial demolitions and new buildings in and around the market. The most visible of these is a glassy market hall with its front door facing Borough High Street (replacing a demolished, listed Georgian terrace attributed to Robert Smirke, the designer of the British Museum), but there are others, such as a new shop beneath the viaduct on the south side of Bedale Street, as well as additions to the roof of the market in places (difficult to identify for the layperson), and a new basement that will be used for storage. Even the Wheatsheaf pub on Stoney Street has had its top floor rudely hacked off, and now hunkers down under the Thameslink soffit. The new architecture ranges from the self-consciously modern, as with the market hall, to the self-effacing, such as the Bedale Street building, which, in its modern blandness, hopes to disappear into the chaotic context of the market.

There were fears from some at the beginning of this process that somehow the market would be destroyed or diminished by the viaduct. That is certainly not the case. Whatever you think of the character of the new pieces, there’s no doubt that this has been a careful adjustment of a valued urban asset. Others have made the point but when train lines were driven through Victorian London, scant regard was paid to those dispossessed by the new cuttings and viaducts. Since 1998, there has been a huge effort to retain the fragile character of the market as far as possible, and after a planning battle consisting of two public inquiries, you cannot say that this has been done with abandon.

And that is as it should be. Borough Market has a profound importance and historical significance for London. It is a crucial part of Borough, the oldest high street in London, and the final staging point before entry into the City for most of its history. Until the 18th century, London Bridge was the only bridge over the Thames, and that made Borough the bottleneck for everyone entering London from the south. Thus Borough became a place of coaching inns and of markets, easily accessible to the farmers of the south of England to sell their wares.

The origins of the market are earlier than the 11th century, as London’s oldest fruit and vegetable market, strategically situated initially at the gateway of London Bridge and at the confluence of riverside imports through the nearby wharves. In 1836, London Bridge Station arrived, London’s earliest rail terminus and still one of its busiest. Borough Market was always a wholesale market, benefiting from all this, but opened up to retail customers in 1998. It still has a wholesale trade (between 2am and 8am on weekdays), but the transport nexus it is now part of is a global one. Borough Market today operates as a tourist destination, an essential stop for travellers seeking authentic London experiences of the kind the market is tuned to provide. Borough Market is somehow our idea of what authenticity should look like: undesigned, packed, colourful and so on. Authenticity is a chimera in the city today, though, and visitors’ imaginary associations with the market will be as much defined by its appearances in movies such as Bridget Jones’s Diary or Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels as by its 1,000 years of trading.

Just as transport has defined Borough Market’s history, it is defining its future. The London-wide project to increase the capacity of the Thameslink commuter line has seen large-scale reconfiguring of railway stations at Blackfriars, Farringdon and others. Here at Borough, Thameslink has had its most significant above-ground impact. There could have been severe consequences for the market, but judicious and dogged good design have saved it from the worst. My only complaints about the new architecture centre on the quality of the materials used. The glass of the market hall on Borough High Street has an ugly, green hue, a sign of cheap glazing, and the new building on Bedale Street is embarrassingly clunky compared with the 1930s structure it replaces. The architect alone can not be blamed for this: the builder Skanska must share responsibility. The new railway bridge across the high street is quite an achievement, though, assembled on the new viaduct and projected across the road on a single weekend. It’s not pretty but its bow truss structure is an emphatic and contemporary take on Victorian engineering.

Right now Borough is still a place in transition. Look down the street that used to be Railway Approach on the west side of Borough High Street, and you’ll find a gleaming, new bridge to nowhere. The new viaduct will not be linked up with the Thameslink network until the completion of the new London Bridge station (current estimate 2018). In the meantime, Borough Market is free again to serve its customers without the intrusion of builders, and its unique built context is secure for the foreseeable future.